Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy
compare him with the most famous political thinkers
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-
1679) is best known for his political thought, and
deservedly so. His vision of the world is strikingly
original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His
main concern is the problem of social and political
order: how human beings can live together in peace
and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He
poses stark alternatives: we should give our
obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person
or group empowered to decide every social and
political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a "state
of nature" that closely resembles civil war – a
situation of universal insecurity, where all have
reason to fear violent death and where rewarding
human cooperation is all but impossible.
One controversy has dominated interpretations of
Hobbes. Does he see human beings as purely self-
interested or egoistic? Several passages support
such a reading, leading some to think that his political
conclusions can be avoided if we adopt a more
realistic picture of human nature. However, most
scholars now accept that Hobbes himself had a much
more complex view of human motivation. A major
theme below will be why the problems he poses
cannot be avoided simply by taking a less "selfish"
view of human nature.
1. Introduction
Hobbes is the founding father of modern political
philosophy. Directly or indirectly, he has set the terms
of debate about the fundamentals of political life right
into our own times. Few have liked his thesis, that the
problems of political life mean that a society should
accept an unaccountable sovereign as its sole
political authority. Nonetheless, we still live in the
world that Hobbes addressed head on: a world where
human authority is something that requires
justification, and is automatically accepted by few; a
world where social and political inequality also
appears questionable; and a world where religious
authority faces significant dispute. We can put the
matter in terms of the concern with equality and rights
that Hobbes's thought heralded: we live in a world
where all human beings are supposed to have rights,
that is, moral claims that protect their basic interests.
But what or who determines what those rights are?
And who will enforce them? In other words, who will
exercise the most important political powers, when
the basic assumption is that we all share the same
entitlements?
We can see Hobbes's importance if we briefly
before and after him. A century before, Nicolo
Machiavelli had emphasized the harsh realities of
power, as well as recalling ancient Roman
experiences of political freedom. Machiavelli appears
as the first modern political thinker, because like
Hobbes he was no longer prepared to talk about
politics in terms set by religious faith (indeed, he was
still more offensive than Hobbes to many orthodox
believers), instead, he looked upon politics as a
secular discipline divorced from theology. But unlike
Hobbes, Machiavelli offers us no comprehensive
philosophy: we have to reconstruct his views on the
importance and nature of freedom; it remains
uncertain which, if any, principles Machiavelli draws
on in his apparent praise of amoral power politics.
Writing a few years after Hobbes, John Locke had
definitely accepted the terms of debate Hobbes had
laid down: how can human beings live together, when
religious or traditional justifications of authority are no
longer effective or persuasive? How is political
authority justified and how far does it extend? In
particular, are our political rulers properly as
unlimited in their powers as Hobbes had suggested?
And if they are not, what system of politics will ensure
that they do not overstep the mark, do not trespass
on the rights of their subjects?
So, in assessing Hobbes's political philosophy, our
guiding questions can be: What did Hobbes write that
was so important? How was he able to set out a way
of thinking about politics and power that remains
decisive nearly four centuries afterwards? We can
get some clues to this second question if we look at
Hobbes's life and times.
2. Life and Times
Hobbes's biography is dominated by the political
events in England and Scotland during his long life.
Born in 1588, the year the Spanish Armada made its
ill-fated attempt to invade England, he lived to the
exceptional age of 91, dying in 1679. He was not born
to power or wealth or influence: the son of a
disgraced village vicar, he was lucky that his uncle
was wealthy enough to provide for his education and
that his intellectual talents were soon recognized and
developed (through thorough training in the classics
of Latin and Greek). Those intellectual abilities, and
his uncle's support, brought him to university at
Oxford. And these in turn - together with a good deal
of common sense and personal maturity - won him a
place tutoring the son of an important noble family,
the Cavendishes. This meant that Hobbes entered
circles where the activities of the King, of Members
of Parliament, and of other wealthy landowners were
known and discussed, and indeed influenced. Thus
intellectual and practical ability brought Hobbes to a
place close to power - later he would even be math
tutor to the future King Charles II. Although this never
made Hobbes powerful, it meant he was acquainted
with and indeed vulnerable to those who were. As the
scene was being set for the Civil Wars of 1642-46
and 1648-51 - wars that would lead to the King being
executed and a republic being declared - Hobbes felt
forced to leave the country for his personal safety,
and lived in France from 1640 to 1651. Even after the
monarchy had been restored in 1660, Hobbes's
security was not always certain: powerful religious
figures, critical of his writings, made moves in
Parliament that apparently led Hobbes to burn some
of his papers for fear of prosecution.
Thus Hobbes lived in a time of upheaval, sharper
than any England has since known. This turmoil had
many aspects and causes, political and religious,
military and economic. England stood divided against
itself in several ways. The rich and powerful were
divided in their support for the King, especially
concerning the monarch's powers of taxation.
Parliament was similarly divided concerning its own
powers vis-à-vis the King. Society was divided
religiously, economically, and by region. Inequalities
in wealth were huge, and the upheavals of the Civil
Wars saw the emergence of astonishingly radical
religious and political sects. (For instance, "the
Levellers" called for much greater equality in terms of
wealth and political rights; "the Diggers," more radical
still, fought for the abolition of wage labor.) Civil war
meant that the country became militarily divided. And
all these divisions cut across one another: for
example, the army of the republican challenger,
Cromwell, was the main home of the Levellers, yet
Cromwell in turn would act to destroy their power
within the army's ranks. In addition, England’s recent
union with Scotland was fragile at best, and was
almost destroyed by King Charles I's attempts to
impose consistency in religious practices. We shall
see that Hobbes's greatest fear was social and
political chaos - and he had ample opportunity both
to observe it and to suffer its effects.
Although social and political turmoil affected
Hobbes's life and shaped his thought, it never
hampered his intellectual development. His early
position as a tutor gave him the scope to read, write
and publish (a brilliant translation of the Greek writer
Thucydides appeared in 1629), and brought him into
contact with notable English intellectuals such
as Francis Bacon. His self-imposed exile in France,
along with his emerging reputation as a scientist and
thinker, brought him into contact with major European
intellectual figures of his time, leading to exchange
and controversy with figures such as Descartes,
Mersenne and Gassendi. Intensely disputatious,
Hobbes repeatedly embroiled himself in prolonged
arguments with clerics, mathematicians, scientists
and philosophers - sometimes to the cost of his
intellectual reputation. (For instance, he argued
repeatedly that it is possible to "square the circle" -
no accident that the phrase is now proverbial for a
problem that cannot be solved!) His writing was as
undaunted by age and ill health as it was by the
events of his times. Though his health slowly failed -
from about sixty, he began to suffer "shaking palsy,"
probably Parkinson’s disease, which steadily
worsened - even in his eighties he continued to
dictate his thoughts to a secretary, and to defend his
quarter in various controversies.
Hobbes gained a reputation in many fields. He was
known as a scientist (especially in optics), as a
mathematician (especially in geometry), as a
translator of the classics, as a writer on law, as a
disputant in metaphysics and epistemology; not
least, he became notorious for his writings and
disputes on religious questions. But it is for his
writings on morality and politics that he has, rightly,
been most remembered. Without these, scholars
might remember Hobbes as an interesting
intellectual of the seventeenth century; but few
philosophers would even recognize his name.
What are the writings that earned Hobbes his
philosophical fame? The first was entitled The
Elements of Law (1640); this was Hobbes's attempt
to provide arguments supporting the King against his
challengers. De Cive [On the Citizen] (1642) has
much in common with Elements, and offers a clear,
concise statement of Hobbes's moral and political
philosophy. His most famous work is Leviathan, a
classic of English prose (1651; a slightly altered Latin
edition appeared in 1668). Leviathan expands on the
argument of De Cive, mostly in terms of its huge
second half that deals with questions of religion.
Other important works include: De Corpore [On the
Body] (1655), which deals with questions of
metaphysics;De Homine [On Man] (1657);
and Behemoth (published 1682, though written
rather earlier), in which Hobbes gives his account of
England's Civil Wars. But to understand the
essentials of Hobbes’s ideas and system, one can
rely on De Civeand Leviathan. It is also worth noting
that, although Leviathan is more famous and more
often read, De Cive actually gives a much more
straightforward account of Hobbes's ideas. Readers
whose main interest is in those ideas may wish to
skip the next section and go straight to ethics and
human nature.
3. Two Intellectual Influences
As well as the political background just stressed, two
influences are extremely marked in Hobbes's work.
The first is a reaction against religious authority as it
had been known, and especially against
the scholastic philosophy that accepted and
defended such authority. The second is a deep
admiration for (and involvement in) the emerging
scientific method, alongside an admiration for a much
older discipline, geometry. Both influences affected
how Hobbes expressed his moral and political ideas.
In some areas it's also clear that they significantly
affected the ideas themselves.
Hobbes's contempt for scholastic philosophy is
boundless. Leviathan and other works are littered
with references to the "frequency of insignificant
speech" in the speculations of the scholastics, with
their combinations of Christian theology and
Aristotelian metaphysics. Hobbes's reaction, apart
from much savage and sparkling sarcasm, is twofold.
In the first place, he makes very strong claims about
the proper relation between religion and politics. He
was not (as many have charged) an atheist, but he
was deadly serious in insisting that theological
disputes should be kept out of politics. (He also
adopts a strongly materialist metaphysics, that - as
his critics were quick to charge - makes it difficult to
account for God's existence as a spiritual entity.) For
Hobbes, the sovereign should determine the proper
forms of religious worship, and citizens never have
duties to God that override their duty to obey political
authority. Second, this reaction against scholasticism
shapes the presentation of Hobbes's own ideas. He
insists that terms be clearly defined and relate to
actual concrete experiences - part of his empiricism.
(Many early sections ofLeviathan read rather like a
dictionary.) Commentators debate how seriously to
take Hobbes's stress on the importance of definition,
and whether it embodies a definite philosophical
doctrine. What is certain, and more important from
the point of view of his moral and political thought, is
that he tries extremely hard to avoid any
metaphysical categories that don't relate to physical
realities (especially the mechanical realities of matter
and motion). Commentators further disagree whether
Hobbes's often mechanical sounding definitions of
human nature and human behavior are actually
important in shaping his moral and political ideas -
see Materialism versus self-knowledge below.
Hobbes's determination to avoid the "insignificant"
(that is, meaningless) speech of the scholastics also
overlaps with his admiration for the emerging
physical sciences and for geometry. His admiration
is not so much for the emerging method of
experimental science, but rather
for deductive science - science that deduces the
workings of things from basic first principles and from
true definitions of the basic elements. Hobbes
therefore approves a mechanistic view of science
and knowledge, one that models itself very much on
the clarity and deductive power exhibited in proofs in
geometry. It is fair to say that this a priori account of
science has found little favor after Hobbes's time. It
looks rather like a dead-end on the way to the
modern idea of science based on patient
observation, theory-building and experiment.
Nonetheless, it certainly provided Hobbes with
a method that he follows in setting out his ideas about
human nature and politics. As presented
in Leviathan, especially, Hobbes seems to build from
first elements of human perception and reasoning, up
to a picture of human motivation and action, to a
deduction of the possible forms of political relations
and their relative desirability. Once more, it can be
disputed whether this method is significant in shaping
those ideas, or merely provides Hobbes with a
distinctive way of presenting them.
4. Ethics and Human Nature
Hobbes's moral thought is difficult to disentangle
from his politics. On his view, what we ought to do
depends greatly on the situation in which we find
ourselves. Where political authority is lacking (as in
his famous natural condition of mankind), our
fundamental right seems to be to save our skins, by
whatever means we think fit. Where political authority
exists, our duty seems to be quite straightforward: to
obey those in power.
But we can usefully separate the ethics from the
politics if we follow Hobbes's own division. For him
ethics is concerned with human nature, while political
philosophy deals with what happens when human
beings interact. What, then, is Hobbes's view of
human nature?
a. Materialism Versus Self-Knowledge
Reading the opening chapters of Leviathan is a
confusing business, and the reason for this is already
apparent in Hobbes's very short "Introduction." He
begins by telling us that the human body is like a
machine, and that political organization ("the
commonwealth") is like an artificial human being. He
ends by saying that the truth of his ideas can be
gauged only by self-examination, by looking into our
selves to adjudge our characteristic thoughts and
passions, which form the basis of all human action.
But what is the relationship between these two very
different claims? For obviously when we look into our
selves we do not see mechanical pushes and pulls.
This mystery is hardly answered by Hobbes's method
in the opening chapters, where he persists in talking
about all manner of psychological phenomena - from
emotions to thoughts to whole trains of reasoning –
as products of mechanical interactions. (As to what
he will say about successful political organization, the
resemblance between the commonwealth and a
functioning human being is slim indeed. Hobbes's
only real point seems to be that there should be a
"head" that decides most of the important things that
the "body" does.)
Most commentators now agree with an argument
made in the 1960's by the political philosopher Leo
Strauss. Hobbes draws on his notion of a
mechanistic science, that works deductively from first
principles, in setting out his ideas about human
nature. Science provides him with a distinctive
method and some memorable metaphors and
similes. What it does not provide - nor could it, given
the rudimentary state of physiology and psychology
in Hobbes's day - are any decisive or substantive
ideas about what human nature really is. Those ideas
may have come, as Hobbes also claims, from self-
examination. In all likelihood, they actually derived
from his reflection on contemporary events and his
reading of classics of political history such as
Thucydides.
This is not to say that we should ignore Hobbes's
ideas on human nature - far from it. But it does mean
we should not be misled by scientific imagery that
stems from an in fact non-existent science (and also,
to some extent, from an unproven and uncertain
metaphysics). The point is important mainly when it
comes to a central interpretative point in Hobbes's
work: whether or not he thinks of human beings as
mechanical objects, programmed as it were to
pursue their self-interest. Some have suggested that
Hobbes's mechanical world-view leaves no room for
the influence of moral ideas, that he thinks the only
effective influence on our behavior will be incentives
of pleasure and pain. But while it is true that Hobbes
sometimes says things like this, we should be clear
that the ideas fit together only in a metaphorical way.
For example, there's no reason why moral ideas
shouldn’t "get into" the mechanisms that drive us
round (like so many clock-work dolls perhaps?).
Likewise, there's no reason why pursuing pleasure
and pain should work in our self-interest. (What self-
interest is depends on the time-scale we adopt, and
how effectively we might achieve this goal also
depends on our insight into what harms and benefits
us). If we want to know what drives human beings,
on Hobbes's view, we must read carefully all he says
about this, as well as what he needs to assume if the
rest of his thought is to make sense. The mechanistic
metaphor is something of a red herring and, in the
end, probably less useful than his other starting point
inLeviathan, the Delphic epithet: nosce teipsum,
"know thyself."
b. The Poverty of Human Judgment and our Need
for Science
There are two major aspects to Hobbes's picture of
human nature. As we have seen, and will explore
below, what motivates human beings to act is
extremely important to Hobbes. The other aspect
concerns human powers of judgment and reasoning,
about which Hobbes tends to be extremely skeptical.
Like many philosophers before him, Hobbes wants to
present a more solid and certain account of human
morality than is contained in everyday beliefs. Plato
had contrasted knowledge with opinion. Hobbes
contrasts science with a whole raft of less reliable
forms of belief - from probable inference based on
experience, right down to "absurdity, to which no
living creature is subject but man" (Leviathan, v.7).
Hobbes has several reasons for thinking that human
judgment is unreliable, and needs to be guided by
science. Our judgments tend to be distorted by self-
interest or by the pleasures and pains of the moment.
We may share the same basic passions, but the
various things of the world affect us all very
differently; and we are inclined to use our feelings as
measures for others. It becomes dogmatic through
vanity and morality, as with "men vehemently in love
with their own new opinions…and obstinately bent to
maintain them, [who give] their opinions also that
reverenced name of conscience" (Leviathan, vii.4).
When we use words which lack any real objects of
reference, or are unclear about the meaning of the
words we use, the danger is not only that our
thoughts will be meaningless, but also that we will fall
into violent dispute. (Hobbes has scholastic
philosophy in mind, but he also makes related points
about the dangerous effects of faulty political ideas
and ideologies.) We form beliefs about supernatural
entities, fairies and spirits and so on, and fear follows
where belief has gone, further distorting our
judgment. Judgment can be swayed this way and
that by rhetoric, that is, by the persuasive and
"colored" speech of others, who can deliberately
deceive us and may well have purposes that go
against the common good or indeed our own good.
Not least, much judgment is concerned with what we
should do now, that is, with future events,
"the future being but a fiction of the mind" (Leviathan,
iii.7) and therefore not reliably known to us.
For Hobbes, it is only science, "the knowledge of
consequences" (Leviathan, v.17), that offers reliable
knowledge of the future and overcomes the frailties
of human judgment. Unfortunately, his picture of
science, based on crudely mechanistic premises and
developed through deductive demonstrations, is not
even plausible in the physical sciences. When it
comes to the complexities of human behavior,
Hobbes's model of science is even less satisfactory.
He is certainly an acute and wise commentator of
political affairs; we can praise him for his hard-
headedness about the realities of human conduct,
and for his determination to create solid chains of
logical reasoning. Nonetheless, this does not mean
that Hobbes was able to reach a level of "scientific"
certainty in his judgments that had been lacking in all
previous reflection on morals and politics.
c. Motivation
The most consequential aspect of Hobbes's account
of human nature centers on his ideas about human
motivation, and this topic is therefore at the heart of
many debates about how to understand Hobbes's
philosophy. Many interpreters have presented the
Hobbesian agent as a self-interested, rationally
calculating actor (those ideas have been important in
modern political philosophy and economic thought,
especially in terms of rational choice theories). It is
true that some of the problems that face people like
this - rational egoists, as philosophers call them - are
similar to the problems Hobbes wants to solve in his
political philosophy. And it is also very common for
first-time readers of Hobbes to get the impression
that he believes we're all basically selfish.
There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and
new readers tend to think the Hobbesian agent is
ultimately self-interested. Hobbes likes to make bold
and even shocking claims to get his point across. "I
obtained two absolutely certain postulates of human
nature," he says, "one, the postulate of human greed
by which each man insists upon his own private use
of common property; the other, the postulate of
natural reason, by which each man strives to avoid
violent death" (De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory). What
could be clearer? - We want all we can get, and we
certainly want to avoid death. There are two
problems with thinking that this is Hobbes's
considered view, however. First, quite simply, it
represents a false view of human nature. People do
all sorts of altruistic things that go against their
interests. They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel
things that go against self-interest (think of the self-
defeating lengths that revenge can run to). So it
would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if
we can find a more plausible account in his work.
Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more
sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or
even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-
interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage,
and so on. And he frequently emphasizes that we find
it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our
interests are anyhow. (Some also suggest that
Hobbes's views on the matter shifted away from
egoism after De Cive, but the point is not crucial
here.)
The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are
basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we
are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas
about what is in our interests. He is rarely surprised
to find human beings doing things that go against
self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our
faces, we will torture others for their eternal salvation,
we will charge to our deaths for love of country. In
fact, a lot of the problems that befall human beings,
according to Hobbes, result from their being too
littleconcerned with self-interest. Too often, he thinks,
we are too much concerned with what others think of
us, or inflamed by religious doctrine, or carried away
by others' inflammatory words. This weakness as
regards our self-interest has even led some to think
that Hobbes is advocating a theory known as ethical
egoism. This is to claim that Hobbes bases morality
upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do what
it is most in our interest to do. But we shall see that
this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes
draws from his account of human nature.
d. Political Philosophy
This is Hobbes's picture of human nature. We are
needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our
attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity
to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies
upon language and is prone to error and undue
influence. When we act, we may do so selfishly or
impulsively or in ignorance, on the basis of faulty
reasoning or bad theology or others' emotive speech.
What is the political fate of this rather pathetic
sounding creature - that is, of us? Unsurprisingly,
Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our
lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful
life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. The
worst, on Hobbes's account, is what he calls the
"natural condition of mankind," a state of violence,
insecurity and constant threat. In outline, Hobbes's
argument is that the alternative to government is a
situation no one could reasonably wish for, and that
any attempt to make government accountable to the
people must undermine it, so threatening the
situation of non-government that we must all wish to
avoid. Our only reasonable option, therefore, is a
"sovereign" authority that is totally unaccountable to
its subjects. Let us deal with the "natural condition" of
non-government, also called the "state of nature,"
first of all.
5. The Natural Condition of Mankind
The state of nature is "natural" in one specific sense
only. For Hobbes political authority is artificial: in the
"natural" condition human beings lack government,
which is an authority created by men. What is
Hobbes's reasoning here? He claims that the only
authority that naturally exists among human beings
is that of a mother over her child, because the child
is so very much weaker than the mother (and
indebted to her for its survival). Among adult human
beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes
concedes an obvious objection, admitting that some
of us are much stronger than others. And although
he's very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser
than others, he doesn't have much difficulty with the
idea that some are fools and others are dangerously
cunning. Nonetheless, it's almost invariably true
that every human being is capable of killing any
other. Even the strongest must sleep; even the
weakest might persuade others to help him kill
another. (Leviathan, xiii.1-2) Because adults are
"equal" in this capacity to threaten one another’s
lives, Hobbes claims there is no natural source of
authority to order their lives together. (He is strongly
opposing arguments that established monarchs have
a natural or God-given right to rule over us.)
Thus, as long as human beings have not successfully
arranged some form of government, they live in
Hobbes's state of nature. Such a condition might
occur at the "beginning of time" (see Hobbes’s
comments on Cain and Abel, Leviathan, xiii.11, Latin
version only), or in "primitive" societies (Hobbes
thought the American Indians lived in such a
condition). But the real point for Hobbes is that a state
of nature could just as well occur in seventeenth
century England, should the King's authority be
successfully undermined. It could occur tomorrow in
every modern society, for example, if the police and
army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of
government. Unless some effective authority
stepped into the King's place (or the place of army
and police and government), Hobbes argues the
result is doomed to be deeply awful, nothing less than
a state of war.
Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible
without an overarching authority? Hobbes provides a
series of powerful arguments that suggest it is
extremely unlikely that human beings will live in
security and peaceful cooperation without
government. (Anarchism, the thesis that we should
live without government, of course disputes these
arguments.) His most basic argument is threefold.
(Leviathan, xiii.3-9) (i) He thinks we will compete,
violently compete, to secure the basic necessities of
life and perhaps to make other material gains. (ii) He
argues that we will challenge others and fight out of
fear ("diffidence"), so as to ensure our personal
safety. (iii) And he believes that we will seek
reputation ("glory"), both for its own sake and for its
protective effects (for example, so that others will be
afraid to challenge us).
This is a more difficult argument than it might seem.
Hobbes does not suppose that we are all selfish, that
we are all cowards, or that we are all desperately
concerned with how others see us. Two points,
though. First, he does think that some of us are
selfish, some of us cowardly, and someof us
"vainglorious" (perhaps some people are of all of
these!). Moreover, many of these people will be
prepared to use violence to attain their ends -
especially if there's no government or police to stop
them. In this Hobbes is surely correct. Second, in
some situations it makes good sense, at least in the
short term, to use violence and to behave selfishly,
fearfully or vaingloriously. If our lives seem to be at
stake, after all, we're unlikely to have many scruples
about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive
someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to
attack first, while his guard is down; if we think that
there are lots of potential attackers out there, it's
going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as
someone who shouldn't be messed with. In Hobbes’s
words, "the wickedness of bad men also compels
good men to have recourse, for their own protection,
to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud."
(De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory) As well as being more
complex than first appears, Hobbes's argument
becomes very difficult to refute.
Underlying this most basic argument is an important
consideration about insecurity. As we shall see
Hobbes places great weight on contracts (thus some
interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market
society dominated by contractual exchanges). In
particular, he often speaks of "covenants," by which
he means a contract where one party performs his
part of the bargain later than the other. In the state of
nature such agreements aren't going to work. Only
the weakest will have good reason to perform the
second part of a covenant, and then only if the
stronger party is standing over them. Yet a huge
amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that
others will return their part of the bargain over time.
A similar point can be made about property, most of
which we can't carry about with us and watch over.
This means we must rely on others respecting our
possessions over extended periods of time. If we
can't do this, then many of the achievements of
human society that involve putting hard work into
land (farming, building) or material objects (the crafts,
or modern industrial production, still unknown in
Hobbes's time) will be near impossible.
One can reasonably object to such points: Surely
there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to
behave in a trustworthy manner? Even if there's no
government providing a framework of law, judgment
and punishment, don't most people have a
reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which
will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and
generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned
with? Indeed, shouldn't our basic sense of morality
prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and
reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first
place? This is the crunch point of Hobbes's
argument, and it is here (if anywhere) that one can
accuse Hobbes of "pessimism." He makes two
claims. The first concerns our duties in the state of
nature (that is, the so-called "right of nature"). The
second follows from this, and is less often noticed: it
concerns the danger posed by our different and
variable judgments of what is right and wrong.
On Hobbes's view the right of nature is quite simple
to define. Naturally speaking - that is, outside of civil
society – we have a right to do whatever we think will
ensure our self-preservation. The worst that can
happen to us is violent death at the hands of others.
If we have any rights at all, if (as we might put it)
nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the
first is surely this: the right to prevent violent death
befalling us. But Hobbes says more than this, and it
is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We
do not just have a right to ensure our self-
preservation: we each have a right to judge what will
ensure our self-preservation. And this is where
Hobbes's picture of humankind becomes important.
Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that
human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of
nature no one is in a position to successfully define
what is good judgment. If I judge that killing you is a
sensible or even necessary move to safeguard my
life, then - in Hobbes's state of nature – I have a right
to kill you. Others might judge the matter differently,
of course. Almost certainly you'll have quite a
different view of things (perhaps you were just
stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot
me). Because we're all insecure, because trust is
more-or-less absent, there's little chance of our
sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we
rely on some (trusted) third party to decide whose
judgment is right. We all have to be judges in our own
causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or
death.
For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that
sound totally amoral. "To this war of every man
against every man," he says, "this also is consequent
[i.e., it follows]: that nothing can be unjust. The
notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have
no place [in the state of nature]." (Leviathan, xiii.13)
He further argues that in the state of nature we each
have a right to all things, "even to one another's body’
(Leviathan, xiv.4). Hobbes is dramatizing his point,
but the core is defensible. If I judge that I need such
and such - an object, another person's labor, another
person’s death - to ensure my continued existence,
then in the state of nature, there is no agreed
authority to decide whether I'm right or wrong. New
readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of
nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were
to picture human beings with some basic moral
ideas. But this is naïve: unless people share the
same moral ideas, not just at the level of general
principles but also at the level of individual judgment,
then the challenge he poses remains unsolved:
human beings who lack some shared authority are
almost certain to fall into dangerous and deadly
conflict.
There are different ways of interpreting Hobbes's
view of the absence of moral constraints in the state
of nature. Some think that Hobbes is imagining
human beings who have no idea of social interaction
and therefore no ideas about right and wrong. In this
case, the natural condition would be a purely
theoretical construction, and would demonstrate
what both government and society do for human
beings. (A famous statement about the state of
nature in De Cive (viii.1) might support this
interpretation: "looking at men as if they had just
emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown
up without any obligation to each other…") Another,
complementary view reads Hobbes as
a psychological egoist, so that - in the state of nature
as elsewhere – he is merely describing the
interaction of ultimately selfish and amoral human
beings.
Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more
complex picture of human motivation, so that there is
no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state
of nature. In particular, it's historically reasonable to
think that Hobbes invariably has civil war in mind,
when he describes our "natural condition." If we think
of civil war, we need to imagine people who’ve lived
together and indeed still do live together - huddled
together in fear in their houses, banded together as
armies or guerrillas or groups of looters. The problem
here isn't a lack of moral ideas - far from it – rather
that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously.
This means (for example) that two people who are
fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both
think they're perfectly entitled to the object and both
think they're perfectly right to kill the other - a point
Hobbes makes explicitly and often. It also enables us
to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are about
religious ideas or political ideals (as well as self-
preservation and so on) - as in the British Civil War
raging while Hobbes wrote Leviathan, and in the
many violent sectarian conflicts throughout the world
today.
In the end, though, whatever account of the state of
nature and its (a) morality we attribute to Hobbes, we
must remember that it is meant to function as a
powerful and decisive threat: if we do not heed
Hobbes's teachings and fail to respect existing
political authority, then the natural condition and its
horrors of war await us.
a. The Laws of Nature and the Social Contract
Hobbes thinks the state of nature is something
we ought to avoid, at any cost except our own self-
preservation (this being our "right of nature," as we
saw above). But what sort of "ought" is this? There
are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. It
might be a counsel of prudence: avoid the state of
nature, if you're concerned to avoid violent death. In
this case Hobbes's advice only applies to us (i) if we
agree that violent death is what we should fear most
and should therefore avoid; and (ii) if we agree with
Hobbes that only an unaccountable sovereign stands
between human beings and the state of nature. This
line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of
Hobbes, but we'll see that it faces serious problems.
The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without
problems either. This takes Hobbes to be saying that
we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of
nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid
this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all
possible. Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we
have such moral obligations. But then two difficult
questions arise: Why theseobligations? And why are
they obligatory?
Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older
vocabulary, using the idea of natural law that many
ancient and medieval philosophers had relied on.
Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern
some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These
principles are independent of (though also
complementary to) whatever moral instruction we
might get from God or religion. In other words, they
are laws given by nature rather than revealed by
God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the
content of these so-called laws of nature. In
particular, he doesn't think that natural law provides
any scope whatsoever to criticize or disobey the
actual laws made by a government. He thus
disagrees with those Protestants who thought that
religious conscience might sanction disobedience of
"immoral" laws, and with Catholics who thought that
the commandments of the Pope have primacy over
those of national political authorities.
Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the
first two that are politically crucial. A third, that
stresses the important of keeping to contracts we
have entered into, is important in Hobbes's moral
justifications of obedience to the sovereign. (The
remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated
in the formula, "do as you would be done by." While
the details are important for scholars of Hobbes, they
do not affect the overall theory and will be ignored
here.)
The first law reads as follows:
Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has
hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it,
that he may seek and use all helps and advantages
of war. (Leviathan, xiv.4)
This repeats the points we have already seen about
our "right of nature," so long as peace does not
appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of
nature is more complicated:
That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-
forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall
think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things,
and be contented with so much liberty against other
men, as he would allow other men against himself.
(Leviathan, xiv.5)
What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from
the state of nature to civil society. But how he does
this is misleading and has generated much confusion
and disagreement. The way that Hobbes describes
this second law of nature makes it look as if we
should all put down our weapons, give up (much of)
our "right of nature," and jointly authorize a sovereign
who will tell us what is permitted and punish us if we
don't obey. But the problem is obvious. If the state of
nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued,
then there's just no way people could ever make an
agreement like this or put it into practice.
At the end of Leviathan, Hobbes seems to concede
this point, saying "there is scarce a commonwealth in
the world whose beginnings can in conscience be
justified" ("Review and Conclusion," 8). That is:
governments have invariably been foisted upon
people by force and fraud, not by collective
agreement. But Hobbes means to defend every
existing government that is powerful enough to
secure peace among its subjects - not just a mythical
government that's been created by a peaceful
contract out of a state of nature. His basic claim is
that we should behave as if we had voluntarily
entered into such a contract with everyone else in our
society - everyone else, that is, except the sovereign
authority.
In Hobbes's myth of the social contract, everyone
except the person or group who will wield sovereign
power lays down their "right to all things." They agree
to limit drastically their right of nature, retaining only
a right to defend their lives in case of immediate
threat. (How limited this right of nature becomes in
civil society has caused much dispute, because
deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of
judgment. It certainly permits us to fight back if the
sovereign tries to kill us. But what if the sovereign
conscripts us as soldiers? What if the sovereign looks
weak and we doubt whether he can continue to
secure peace…?) The sovereign, however, retains
his (or her, or their) right of nature, which we have
seen is effectively a right to all things - to decide what
everyone else should do, to decide the rules of
property, to judge disputes and so on. Hobbes
concedes that there are moral limits on what
sovereigns should do (God might call a sovereign to
account). However, since in any case of dispute the
sovereign is the only rightful judge - on this earth, that
is – those moral limits make no practical difference. In
every moral and political matter, the decisive
question for Hobbes is always: who is to judge? As
we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is
judge in our own cause, part of the reason why
Hobbes thinks it is inevitably a state of war. Once civil
society exists, the only rightful judge is the sovereign.
b. Why Should we Obey the Sovereign?
If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual
promise, then it might seem half-way plausible to
think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign
(although even this requires the claim that promising
is a moral value that overrides all others). If we have
been conquered or, more fortunately, have simply
been born into a society with an established political
authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes has
to make three steps here, all of which have seemed
weak to many of his readers. First of all, he insists
that promises made under threat of violence are
nonetheless freely made, and just as binding as any
others. Second, he has to put great weight on the
moral value of promise keeping, which hardly fits with
the absence of duties in the state of nature. Third, he
has to give a story of how those of us born and raised
in a political society have made some sort of implied
promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to
show that we are bound (either morally or out of self-
interest) to behave as if we had made such a
promise.
In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic
picture of the world, to suggest that threats of force
do not deprive us of liberty. Liberty, he says, is
freedom of motion, and I am free to move whichever
way I wish, unless I am literally enchained. If I yield
to threats of violence, that is my choice, for physically
I could have done otherwise. If I obey the sovereign
for fear of punishment or in fear of the state of nature,
then that is equally my choice. Such obedience then
comes, for Hobbes, to constitute a promise that I will
continue to obey.
Second, promises carry a huge moral weight for
Hobbes, as they do in all social contract theories. The
question, however, is why we should think they
are so important. Why should my (coerced) promise
oblige me, given the wrong you committed in
threatening me and demanding my valuables?
Hobbes has no good answer to this question (but see
below, on egoistic interpretations of Hobbes's
thinking here). His theory suggests that (in the state
of nature) you could do me no wrong, as the right of
nature dictates that we all have a right to all things.
Likewise, promises do not oblige in the state of
nature, inasmuch as they go against our right of
nature. In civil society, the sovereign's laws dictate
what is right and wrong; if your threat was wrongful,
then my promise will not bind me. But as the
sovereign is outside of the original contract, he sets
the terms for everyone else: so his threats create
obligations.
As this suggests, Hobbesian promises are strangely
fragile. Implausibly binding so long as a sovereign
exists to adjudicate and enforce them, they lose all
power should things revert to a state of nature.
Relatedly, they seem to contain not one jot of loyalty.
To be logically consistent, Hobbes needs to be
politically implausible. Now there are passages
where Hobbes sacrifices consistency for plausibility,
arguing we have a duty to fight for our (former)
sovereign even in the midst of civil war. Nonetheless
the logic of his theory suggests that, as soon as
government starts to weaken and disorder sets in,
our duty of obedience lapses. That is, when the
sovereign power needs our support, because it is no
longer able to coerce us, there is no effective judge
or enforcer of covenants, so that such promises no
longer override our right of nature. This turns
common sense on its head. Surely a powerful
government can afford to be challenged, for instance
by civil disobedience or conscientious objection? But
when civil conflict and the state of nature threaten, in
other words when government is failing, then we
might reasonably think that political unity is as
morally important as Hobbes always suggests. A
similar question of loyalty also comes up when the
sovereign power has been usurped - when Cromwell
has supplanted the King, when a foreign invader has
ousted our government. Right from the start,
Hobbes's critics saw that his theory makes turncoats
into moral heroes: our allegiance belongs to whoever
happens to be holding the gun(s). Perversely, the
only crime the makers of a coup can commit is to fail.
Why does this problem come about? To overcome
the fact that his contract is a fiction, Hobbes is driven
to construct a "sort of" promise out of the fact of our
subjugation to whatever political authority exists. He
stays wedded to the idea that obedience can only find
a moral basis in a "voluntary" promise, because only
this seems to justify the almost unlimited obedience
and renunciation of individual judgment he's
determined to prove. It is no surprise that Hobbes's
arguments creak at every point: nothing could bear
the weight of justifying such an overriding duty.
All the difficulties in finding a reliable moral obligation
to obey might tempt us back to the idea that Hobbes
is some sort of egoist. However, the difficulties with
this tack are even greater. There are two sorts of
egoism commentators have attributed to Hobbes:
psychological and ethical. The first theory says that
human beings always act egoistically, the second
that they ought to act egoistically. Either view might
support this simple idea: we should obey the
sovereign, because his political authority is what
keeps us from the evils of the natural condition. But
the basic problem with such egoistic interpretations,
from the point of view of Hobbes's system of politics,
is shown when we think about cases where
selfishness seems to conflict with the commands of
the sovereign - for example, where illegal conduct will
benefit us or keep us from danger. For a
psychologically egoist agent, such behavior will be
irresistible; for an ethically egoist agent, it will be
morally obligatory. Now, providing the sovereign is
sufficiently powerful and well-informed, he can
prevent many such cases arising by threatening and
enforcing punishments of those who disobey.
Effective threats of punishment mean that obedience
is in our self-interest. But such threats will not be
effective when we think our disobedience can go
undetected. After Orwell's 1984 we can imagine a
state that is so powerful that no reasonable person
would ever think disobedience could pay. But for
Hobbes, such a powerful sovereign was not even
conceivable: he would have had to assume that there
would be many situations where people could
reasonably hope to "get away with it." (Likewise,
under non-totalitarian, liberal politics, there are many
situations where illegal behavior is very unlikely to be
detected or punished.) So, still thinking of egoistic
agents, the more people do get away with it, the more
reason others have to think they can do the same.
Thus the problem of disobedience threatens to
"snowball," undermining the sovereign and plunging
selfish agents back into the chaos of the state of
nature.
In other words, sovereignty as Hobbes imagined it,
and liberal political authority as we know it, can only
function where people feel some additional
motivation apart from pure self-interest. Moreover,
there is strong evidence that Hobbes was well aware
of this. Part of Hobbes's interest in religion (a topic
that occupies half of Leviathan) lies in its power to
shape human conduct. Sometimes this does seem to
work through self-interest, as in crude threats of
damnation and hell-fire. But Hobbes's main interest
lies in the educative power of religion, and indeed of
political authority. Religious practices, the doctrines
taught in the universities (!), the beliefs and habits
inculcated by the institutions of government and
society: how these can encourage and secure
respect for law and authority seem to be even more
important to Hobbes's political solutions than his
theoretical social contract or shaky appeals to simple
self-interest.
What are we to conclude, then, given the difficulties
in finding a reliable moral or selfish justification for
obedience? In the end, for Hobbes, everything rides
on the value of peace. Hobbes wants to say both that
civil order is in our "enlightened" self-interest, and
that it is of overwhelming moral value. Life is never
going to be perfect for us, and life under the
sovereign is the best we can do. Recognizing this
aspect ofeveryone's self-interest should lead us to
recognize the moral value of supporting whatever
authority we happen to live under. For Hobbes, this
moral value is so great - and the alternatives so stark
– that it should override every threat to our self-
interest except the imminent danger of death. The
million-dollar question is then: is a life of obedience
to the sovereign really the best human beings can
hope for?
c. Life Under the Sovereign
Hobbes has definite ideas about the proper nature,
scope and exercise of sovereignty. Much that he
says is cogent, and much of it can reduce the worries
we might have about living under this drastically
authoritarian sounding regime. Many commentators
have stressed, for example, the importance Hobbes
places upon the rule of law. His claim that much of
our freedom, in civil society, "depends on the silence
of the laws" is often quoted (Leviathan, xxi.18). In
addition, Hobbes makes many points that are
obviously aimed at contemporary debates about the
rights of King and Parliament - especially about the
sovereign's rights as regards taxation and the seizure
of property, and about the proper relation between
religion and politics. Some of these points continue
to be relevant, others are obviously anachronistic:
evidently Hobbes could not have imagined the
modern state, with its vast bureaucracies, massive
welfare provision and complicated interfaces with
society. Nor could he have foreseen how incredibly
powerful the state might become, meaning that
"sovereigns" such as Hitler or Stalin might starve,
brutalize and kill their subjects, to such an extent that
the state of nature looks clearly preferable.
However, the problem with all of Hobbes's notions
about sovereignty is that - on his account – it is not
Hobbes the philosopher, nor we the citizens, who
decide what counts as the proper nature, scope or
exercise of sovereignty. He faces a systematic
problem: justifying any limits or constraints on the
sovereign involves making judgments about moral or
practical requirements. But one of his greatest
insights, still little recognized by many moral
philosophers, is that any right or entitlement is only
practically meaningful when combined with a
concrete judgment as to what it dictates in some
given case. Hobbes's own failure, however
understandable, to foresee the growth of government
and its powers only supports this thought: that the
proper nature, scope or exercise of sovereignty is a
matter of complex judgment. Alone among the
people who comprise Hobbes's commonwealth, it
is the sovereign who judges what form he should
appear in, how far he should reach into the lives of
his subjects, and how he should exercise his powers.
It should be added that the one part of his system that
Hobbes concedes not to be proven with certainty is
just this question: who or what should constitute the
sovereign power. It was natural for Hobbes to think
of a King, or indeed a Queen (he was born under
Elizabeth I). But he was certainly very familiar with
ancient forms of government, including aristocracy
(government by an elite) and democracy
(government by the citizens, who formed a relatively
small group within the total population). Hobbes was
also aware that an assembly such as Parliament
could constitute a sovereign body. All have
advantages and disadvantages, he argues. But the
unity that comes about from having a single person
at the apex, together with fixed rules of succession
that pre-empt dispute about who this person should
be, makes monarchy Hobbes's preferred option.
In fact, if we want to crack open Hobbes's sovereign,
to be able to lay down concrete ideas about its nature
and limits, we must begin with the question of
judgment. For Hobbes, dividing capacities to judge
between different bodies is tantamount to letting the
state of nature straight back in. "For what is it to
divide the power of a commonwealth, but to dissolve
it; for powers divided mutually destroy each other."
(Leviathan, xxix.12; cf De Cive, xii.5) Beyond the
example of England in the 1640s, Hobbes hardly
bothers to argue the point, although it is crucial to his
entire theory. Always in his mind is the Civil War that
arose when Parliament claimed the right to judge
rules of taxation, and thereby prevented the King
from ruling and making war as he saw fit, and when
churches and religious sects claimed prerogatives
that went against the King's decisions.
Especially given modern experiences of the division
of powers, however, it's easy to see that these
examples are extreme and atypical. We might recall
the American constitution, where powers of
legislation, execution and case-by-case judgment
are separated (to Congress, President and the
judiciary respectively) and counter-balance one
another. Each of these bodies is responsible for
judging different questions. There are often, of
course, boundary disputes, as to whether legislative,
executive or judicial powers should apply to a given
issue, and no one body is empowered to settle this
crucial question of judgment. Equally obviously,
however, such disputes have not led to a state of
nature (well, at least if we think of the US after the
Civil War). For Hobbes it is simply axiomatic that
disputation as to who should judge important social
and political issues spells the end of the
commonwealth. For us, it is equally obvious that only
a few extreme forms of dispute have this very
dangerous power. Dividing the powers that are
important to government need not leave a society
more open to those dangerous conflicts. Indeed,
many would now argue that political compromises
which provide different groups and bodies with
independent space to judge certain social or political
issues can be crucial for preventing disputes from
escalating into violent conflict or civil war.
6. Conclusion
What happens, then, if we do not follow Hobbes in
his arguments that judgment must, by necessity or by
social contract or both, be the sole province of the
sovereign? If we are optimists about the power of
human judgment, and about the extent of moral
consensus among human beings, we have a
straightforward route to the concerns of modern
liberalism. Our attention will not be on the question of
social and political order, rather on how to maximize
liberty, how to define social justice, how to draw the
limits of government power, and how to realize
democratic ideals. We will probably interpret Hobbes
as a psychological egoist, and think that the problems
of political order that obsessed him were the product
of an unrealistic view of human nature, or unfortunate
historical circumstances, or both. In this case, I
suggest, we might as well not have read Hobbes at
all.
If we are less optimistic about human judgment in
morals and politics, however, we should not doubt
that Hobbes's problems remain our problems. But
hindsight shows grave limitations to his solutions.
Theoretically, Hobbes fails to prove that we have an
almost unlimited obligation to obey the sovereign. His
arguments that sovereignty - the power to judge
moral and political matters, and enforce those
judgments - cannot be divided are not only weak;
they are simply refuted by the (relatively) successful
distribution of powers in modern liberal societies. Not
least, the horrific crimes of twentieth century
dictatorships show beyond doubt that judgment
about right and wrong cannot be a question only for
our political leaders.
If Hobbes's problems are real and his solutions only
partly convincing, where will we go? It might
reasonably be thought that this is the central question
of modern political thought. We will have no doubt
that peaceful coexistence is one of the greatest
goods of human life, something worth many
inconveniences, sacrifices and compromises. We will
see that there is moral force behind the laws and
requirements of the state, simply because human
beings do indeed need authority and systems of
enforcement if they are to cooperate peacefully. But
we can hardly accept that, because human judgment
is weak and faulty, that there can be only one judge
of these matters - precisely because that judge might
turn out to be very faulty indeed. Our concern will be
how we can effectively divide power between
government and people, while still ensuring that
important questions of moral and political judgment
are peacefully adjudicated. We will be concerned
with the standards and institutions that provide for
compromise between many different and conflicting
judgments. And all the time, we will remember
Hobbes's reminder that human life is never without
inconvenience and troubles, that we must live with a
certain amount of bad, to prevent the worst: fear of
violence, and violent death.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/#SH4a